Thoughts from the interface of science, religion, law and culture

After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

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Repub. Strategist A Bit Late to the Party

Here’s a quote from Republican strategist and consultant Mark McKinnon, who feigns surprise at the fact that the Todd Akin situation reveals that the party he works for is filled with politicians who will do anything at all to eliminate a woman’s right to control her own reproduction:

“It’s very tough for people like me who are pro-choice Republicans. It’s admittedly not a large caucus. But when I have to see a story like Todd Akin, and then turn to my wife and my daughters, who are looking at me and saying, `Really? These are the kind of people you’re associating with in the Republican Party?’ That’s a problem.”

That was GOP strategist Mark McKinnon talking to Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC just now, deftly capturing the mess Todd Akin has created for the GOP and the Romney/Ryan campaign.

Really? Your wife and daughters are just now asking that question? And this just occurred to you? You haven’t been paying attention in class, young man.

See, there’s the people who used to control the party, sane, hateful fuckers; there’s the people who currently control the party, insane hateful fuckers–they’re all liars. The Inliars/Outliars, it was all just a spelling mistake, “Outliers” that was causing the problem.

Ed:

“who feigns surprise at the fact that the Todd Akin situation reveals that the party he works for is filled with politicians who will do anything at all to WIN AN ELECTION*

* Eliminating a woman’s right to control her own reproduction is just fecal frosting on the shitcake of the Reptilican party.

At least his wife and daughters are questioning him. That’s a good sign.

But the fact that he can see all this nonsensical insanity and STILL be unwilling to leave the party is a very bad sign. Seriously, how deep must their hatred of liberals be for them to stay in the GOP even as they admit how unhinged and shameful they are?

If this guy can admit the Republicans are this bad, and still not even make a credible threat to defect, then he’s worthless, and can’t call himself “pro-choice” or “decent.”

There seems to be several thug groups who claim to be pro-choice, albeit to what extent I’ve no idea, nor what the differences are between them. One example (link goes to The Pffft! of All Knowledge): Republicans for Choice. Another example (partisan link): Republican Majority for Choice. There may be other examples?

There is simply nothing salvagable about the rep. party. And the rep. backlash against Akin is all about damage control. They’ve been spouting off this hateful shit too loud for too long to pretend it never happened

Clearly McKinnon is not a single issue, pro-choice rethug or he’d have needed to quit years ago. Akin forced him to look at that facet of his chosen political affiliation and, once again, confirm that it is not enough of a travesty to force him to change.

McKinnon can then bury that bit of reality and focus on the next GOP idiocy, one at a time. Birtherism, bigotry, theocracy, anti-gay, anti-immigration, anti-regulation, anti-science, etc. Each individual anachronism or bit of insanity, can by itself, be ignored apparently. If a normally intelligent human were to examine all of the GOP crap together, their head would explode before they could support the group.

McKinnon and many others can only stay in the GOP by compartmentalizing their party’s policies. Nothing else makes sense. Including the GOP.

People like McKinnon, whether personally anti-choice or not, have been shamelessly pandering to that crowd for decades now. But it goes beyond just the issue of abortion. The republican party’s opportunism since the last sixties has been a two-pronged approach: Pander to the religious right and spew ever-escalating anti-government rhetoric to fire up the conservative base. Now we have an entire generation of republicans who have grown up on this nonsense to point where they can no longer tell the difference between fantasy and reality. They think Atlas Shrugged is an economics text book, 1984 is a how-to book, and Red Dawn was a war documentary.

What shocks McKinnon now is that this brain-rotted generation has now risen through the ranks of the GOP and the party is dominated by true believers like Bachmann and Ryan. This dismays career republicans like him,not because his wife and daughters are offended, but that the inmates are now running the asylum. The sheep were just supposed to show up every other year and vote. They’re were never supposed to have any reall power or influence within the party.

When I see people like this who can’t seem to break away from a group they know is bad, I get disturbed. It’s bad enough that there are people who appear perfectly willing to alter their basic morality whenever the group leadership asks them to. It seems worse to me that some people recognize how bad the group is but won’t take a stand, resigning themselves to inaction. It’s much the same thing with the Catholic child rape scandal.

I’ve had my issues with the Democrats, and I’ve been perfectly willing to criticize Obama despite voting for his first term. I don’t support the party blindly, and I don’t consider myself a member. If the Democratic party went as insane as the Republican party, I’d expect I’d sever ties before compromising.

I wonder where psychological normality is, how much nature versus nurture there is, and how being a political outsider affects my perspective of the groups.

Bronze Dog, #12:When I see people like this who can’t seem to break away from a group they know is bad, I get disturbed.

Especially since we have a perfectly sane conservative party, namely, the Democrats. In so far as “conservative” is supposed to stand for a well-defined ideology whose tenets you can look up on Wikipedia or something (I actually haven’t done this – I may be saying something stupid again), the Democratic Party is the conservative party in the US.

The fact that the Democrats are called “liberal” has more to do with how crazy contemporary US politics have become, not with any intrinsic meaning of the words.

“It’s very tough for people like me who are pro-Jewish Nazis. It’s admittedly not a large caucus. But when I have to see a story like Adolf Eichmann, and then turn to my wife and my daughters, who are looking at me and saying, `Really? These are the kind of people you’re associating with in the Nazi Party?’ That’s a problem.”

That is exactly what I don’t understand about politics in the US. The difference between who women vote for and who men vote for indicate that there are a lot of different-sex marriages where the woman knows exactly where her best interests lie, but her husband has clearly indicated that he doesn’t really respect her an equal human being.

Hm. Sometimes I do wonder whether or not people like McKinnon are actually lying. The very idea of anyone siding with the GOP while being pro-choice causes me all kinds of what feels like cognitive dissonance, and I’m not even the one holding to both values. Maybe it is lying, or maybe people like McKinnon are just really, really good at compartmentalizing. Anecdote: a relative was a lifelong Republican. Then the GOP went truly batshit and he still hung on, despite him loving science, barely tolerating the religious, and favouring feminism. That was weird, watching him contort himself during the Bush Jr. years. Then Obama came to power and shortly after he cast himself adrift from the party, finally admitting to himself that the GOP had become an asylum for the completely insane, run by hateful, power-mad assholes.

This is only surprising if you still believe the ancient Greek notion that abstract principles and thoughts dictate behavior. Any competent DI, Mary Kay recruiter, or gang leader knows better: behavior dictates thoughts.

Get people to make a commitment. It doesn’t have to be much — which line you stand in at lunch can do it. Then make them choose between the commitment (platoon, tribe, gang, political party, whatever) and some previously held belief (like for instance not stealing, not killing, not voting for idiots who think Barton is a historian …

Once they jettison one previous belief, move on to the next. Before long, they don’t have any real positions other than membership. Somewhere along the way, they’ve discovered that membership is not only the most important thing in their lives, it’s the only thing left in their lives — partly because they’ve rejected sane society, and partly because residual guilt makes them afraid that sane society will reject them now that they’ve devolved to the jellyfish stage.

McKinnon is just going through another of those step-by-step crises where he’s being reminded that “sane society” might just include his wife and children. He’ll resolve it eventually: either they’ll take the next step in joining the Party and letting it make all of the important decisions for them (and they’ll like it, too, because of the sacrifices they make for it) or he’ll sacrifice them, too, because the Party is more important to him.

The Republican Party: it’s not the most important thing in your life, it is your life.

Hm. Sometimes I do wonder whether or not people like McKinnon are actually lying. The very idea of anyone siding with the GOP while being pro-choice causes me all kinds of what feels like cognitive dissonance, and I’m not even the one holding to both values. Maybe it is lying, or maybe people like McKinnon are just really, really good at compartmentalizing. Anecdote: a relative was a lifelong Republican.

I have and continue to vote for candidates who are either pro- or anti-abortion rights. I have no problems with cognitive dissonance. Frequently the candidate can do little to marginally change the current laws in the office they’re running to win. And that’s coupled to other factors I do perceive them being able to influence which I find are far more important to the national interest given the marginally modest changes they can make in the abortion laws (modest in the sense of where we’re headed historically over the next couple of decades, which I’m confident will be left).

With the future well-being of humanity at stake given global warming, and our economic and financial well-being also at stake given the state of the economy given our budgetary malfeasance, I find it unserious to vote for candidates based on their views on gun rights, gay rights, and abortion when their gaining office won’t change those items much if any. The economy was obviously headed for a a cliff in 2004 and yet I know people who voted for Bush based on their perception of Kerry’s position on gun and abortion rights. That’s nuts.

The fact I’m pro-gun control, gay rights, and abortion rights does have me voting for Democrats far more than Republicans at the national level, but not always. And while it’s normally true anti-abortion rights politicians also advocate a bunch of other positions which has me disqualifying them based on character and competence, that’s not always true. E.g, I’m happy with my votes for MI’s current Republican Gov. Rick Snyder and do not regret repeatedly voting for Democrat Bart Stupak in MI’s 1st U.S. Congressional District – both of whom are anti-abortion rights though Gov. Snyder recently stopped a particularly loathsome abortion law MI’s GOP-dominated legislature cooked-up. The Republicans running against Rep. Stupak were wrong not just on the positions I think Stupak was wrong on like abortion, but also far more consistent with your garden variety Tea Bagger. (In fact Stupak retired after the last Congress and tea bagger Dick I mean Dan Benishek replaced him.

Obviously anti-abortion rights governors have the ability to set back women’s rights in this area, which Gov. Snyder unfortunately also has done. However there are other issues and some also carry enormous weight when it comes to our collective well-being. Michigan’s economic well-being living in the toilet now is one of those more pressing items, where the Democrats ran an incredibly weak candidate that ran on a platform of long-failed liberal policies Democrats at the national level started rejecting the mid-1980s.

“`Really? These are the kind of people you’re associating with in the Republican Party?’ That’s a problem.””

Yes, Mark. The problem isn’t that you work for a party controlled by hate-filled bigots. The problem is that it’s personally embarrassing for you when that fact becomes obvious to your immediate family.